Path: csiph.com!v102.xanadu-bbs.net!xanadu-bbs.net!feeder.erje.net!eu.feeder.erje.net!news.swapon.de!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Helpful Harry Newsgroups: comp.databases.filemaker Subject: Re: Are There Examples to Look At? Date: Mon, 17 Nov 2014 13:19:32 +1300 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Lines: 37 Message-ID: <171120141319320325%HelpfulHarry@BusyWorking.com> References: <1lv7c6t.1lox3van4r94jN%csampson@inetworld.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: poKfE1Gyi+roCw4EMHh37w.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Thoth/1.5.4 (Carbon/OS X) X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: csiph.com comp.databases.filemaker:1929 In article <1lv7c6t.1lox3van4r94jN%csampson@inetworld.net>, Charles H. Sampson wrote: > > I think I'm getting a handle on FileMaker, but I'm not sure if it's the > "right" handle. I'm able to generate pretty elaborate reports by using > scripts to populate special tables and layouts to display the tables' > data. Is this the "right" way? The database program I'm coming from uses > a function based language that allows a pretty complex specification of > a subset of a database, which in FileMaker would require multiple finds, > expands, and constrains. Then there's a similar language that can be > used at the report level to operate on such a subset. FileMaker's Find Requests are good at finding subsets of records without needing expands and constrains (personally I've never needed to use either of those). It can be a bit complicated to get used to how the "And", "Or" and "Not" requests work. FileMaker's Summary fields and section are also good ways to get reports summarised data. Although having said that, FileMaker is not a "number cruncher" and it's often easier to to statistical reports via Excel. > I think I'm at the point where I need to learn from the masters. Are > there any examples of fairly complex databases lying around that I could > look at? FileMaker does come with some database's, although in some cases they unfortunately are are pretty shoddy examples and aren't perhpas massively complex in their reporting options. People do post examples and free Filemaker solutions on places like FMForums.com Helpful Harry :o)